Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Early yesterday morning, police officers in Petaluma, CA recovered another pistol from the cache stolen in Lincoln's largest gun burglary at Scheel's back in October, 2007. The pistol recovered way up in Sonoma County yesterday, a Kahr Arms CW .40 S&W, was discovered after a DWI arrest. It has been more than two years since any of the Scheel's guns have surfaced. With this latest recovery, 49 of the 79 stolen firearms have been accounted for, and 30 remain at large.

Meanwhile, Cleophus Collier, after having received a relatively gentle wrist slap for that burglary, as did pretty much everyone involved, is currently facing federal charges for bank robbery. He's not likely to receive a wrist slap for that one.

I am opposed to 99% of the current 20,000 gun laws on the books. However I would like to see at least two gun related laws passed. First I want a national database of ALL stolen firearms made available to the Public on the Internet or by telephone.. Then I would like to see a MANDATORY twenty year sentence for anyone convicted of stealing or knowingly possessing a STOLEN firearm. No plea bargaining or parole for a gun theft.

Sorry, so-called truth in sentencing laws never turn out as promised. Neither does the pipe dream of "no plea bargains", because of the composition of juries and the taxpayer expense of jury rials.

In an ideal world - which this world will never be - I'd prefer to see "good time" eliminated for violent felonies, replaced with extra time over and above the original sentence piled on to punish being anything less than a perfect inmate. Inspections every day. I must be smoking whatever you are, because my pipe dream won't happen either.

I think it also bears repeating the fact that if the alarm monitoring company had called LPD when the alarm was tripped, notifying them of a possible burglary-in-progress at a firearm retailer, LPD almost surely would have been on site long before the burglars had departed with their haul.

Lincoln didn't even have any sort of of punitive fee for repeated false alarms at that time, and I don't know if it was store policy or corporate policy for the manager to be called, then drive to the store, and make sure it was a bona fide trip before police were called, but it was somebody's fault that policy existed (and probably still exists today).

I wonder what the recovery rate is for stolen firearms from licensed dealers? Scheels robbery may have gotten a lot of press but going back close to forty years ACHER ARMS has been robbed, burgaled and IIRC they even had an employee killed in a robbery. How does the recovery rate of the stolen weapons from those two establishments compare?

I hate to admit it, but I do not have any data at my fingertips to give you on the number of recovered stolen firearms. There are a fair number every year, though. I suspect the percentage recovered in the five years after the Scheels burglary would be pretty large, primarily because a large stash was recovered the following day.

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